Poor organisation means that popular consumable and common items or items on promotion (complete with national advertising campaigns) are poorly stocked. It is not unusual to run out of memory cards, cases, cables, screen protectors or other accessories due to the store only holding a minimal amount of each item and major national promotions on larger items (vaccum cleaners for example) might see crowds of people flocking to the store all trying to purchase our inventory of five of each model. It's hardly the end of the world but it's pretty dispiriting to tell every third customer that what they came in for isn't in stock or else it is in stock but all the accessories advertised as bundled with it are out of stock and will be in 'sometime', probably.
Despite generally good ethics all stores have a cable demonstration rigged up which shows a TV fed by one of their own brand 'premium' HDMI cables right next to an identical TV fed by an unshielded analogue cable with the implication that premium HDMI cables lead to a better quality picture. This is not a fair comparison since it is not demonstrating the quality difference between 'premium' HDMI vs 'normal' HDMI but the quality difference between analogue and digital. Bearing in mind premium HDMI cables can run up to £90 this is a pretty poor show. Without going into boring technical details there is no difference between the quality of signal from one of these premium cables and any other cable which has been rated as HDMI standard, these cheaper ones are available online for £3 or so. While I'm happy with the idea of a 'nicer' cable for more money (looks better, lasts longer, stronger etc) I am less comfortable that it is not made plain that the differences are essentially cosmetic. I am equally unsure why nicer connectors = 3000% cost increase. If selling these premium cables were not a target of ours I would find it far less of an issue however I suspect many people get talked into buying them who don't understand them and wouldn't want them if they did.
Customers are more clued up about their legal rights nowadays than when I started in retail. Overall this is really good and translates into dealing with sensible, well educated people who ask for exactly what they're entitled to - no problems there. Unfortunately amidst all of this has flourished a subculture of less well educated people who live by the mantra 'It must be true... I read it on the interwebs.' Cue much hooting about 'I want a refund because every product has to have a two/six year warranty on it by law.' or 'You can't send it off to the manufacturer for repair, my contract is with you not them and I want a brand new one.' A little knowledge is truly a dangerous thing.
Following on from the above it should almost go without saying that whenever you do a job dealing with the general public you will almost certainly find yourself dealing with some self-important, entitled moron giving you abuse for some arbitrary reason for which you are probably not personally responsible. Bonus points if they've mistaken your place of work for a different company.
Finally some of what I sell are services to be carried out away from where I work, things like delivery, installation, technical support, annual PC health checks and warranties. I have no idea how good these services actually are. I'm acting in good faith and I'm pretty confident that the services are good and worth the money -certainly very, very few people come back into store with reasonable and well founded complaints- but it's pretty disconcerting when a customer relates a tale of a similar purchase going wrong in the past (often dodgy delivery men) before asking you how good your deliver drivers (or whatever) are. The answer is that I really don't know - we're too big a company for the sales guys to have that kind of knowledge.
